Wong in a Million: Spotlight on Kristina Wong

By Amanda L. Andrei

It’s hard to resist punning on Kristina Wong’s name – after all, so many of her shows are takes on her Chinese surname: Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Going Green the Wong Way, Wong Street Journal… Covering a vast range of topics (from suicide to environmental living to global poverty), their common thread is the hilariously meta, poignantly quirky, and artfully raucous Kristina Wong.

Hailing from a third generation Chinese American family in San Francisco, Kristina remembers her love for performance way back in high school, performing fake SNL sketches with her best friend at assemblies. “I felt so free—I broke out of the mold of what I was supposed to be. And it was fun to devise these sketches and afterwards get in a lot trouble.” She was actually quite the model student—she just happened to also be pushing boundaries at an all-girls Catholic school.

Not until Kristina got to college did she begin thinking about race. “I would hear racist things and things about gender—always subtle—whether it was someone saying, ‘Asian people are so quiet and smart’ (like we were robots) or ‘I like dating Asian women because they’re more exotic,’” Kristina explains. And after taking a Chicana theatre class at UCLA, she realized there was more to the struggle of people of color: “It was an ‘aha’ moment to see intersections between Asian American movements and the Chicano movement.” Her work began to infuse these struggles and perceptions, conscious of the obstacles and stereotypes faced by people of color.

In the summer of 2006, Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest premiered in Los Angeles. A one-woman show tackling depression and suicide as experienced by Asian American women, the show was a success, being performed at multiple venues and making its way into film format. Kristina’s next show, Going Green the Wong Way delved into new subject matter, detailing the failures of sustainable living and the pains of living in Los Angeles with a vegetable oil-fueled car. The show brought her to international heights, including the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the largest fringe festival in the world.

So naturally, her next show delved into global poverty. Debuting in 2015, Wong Street Journal already has a significant amount of material, covering everything from politics between the first and third world to Chinese character tattoos in northern Uganda. Kristina spent roughly a week in Cambodia and several weeks in Uganda conducting research. “It’s almost impossible right now to describe poverty. It’s much more complex than ‘these people are bad, these people are good,’” she relates. “How am I going to talk about people in Uganda as an Asian American woman? I still don’t know the answer.”

Kristina also admits the challenges in being an artist and creating work out of politically and emotionally charged topics: “Every moment you can put something out in the world where something doesn’t exist is a powerful thing. And it’s not easy. It’s not something people should get into because they don’t have a good therapist or lots of money or attention—this is such a long marathon of a life.” And artists make ripples in the world—Kristina recalls watching a one-woman performance of a half-Filipino queer friend and feeling totally blown away, an experience that had an impact on her future work. “I left inspired to keep doing what I’m doing, and I believe there’s such a thing as a butterfly effect.”

And so more than artist, educator, or activist, perhaps the best way to describe Kristina is simply: creator. Keep on the lookout for Wong Street Journal next year—with any luck, we can catch a performance in Washington D.C. and find out just what exactly how Kristina makes the world go Wong.